WIRED Summer Binge-Watching Guide: True Blood

God, remember how weird Bill's hair was in the beginning? Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

True Blood has been with us for a long time, but in just a few short weeks, we start saying our goodbyes to the wild rapscallions of Bon Temps, Louisiana. For more than six years we’ve followed the misadventures of Sookie Stackhouse, the perky waitress who after hooking up with a vampire seems unable to avoid having to handle one supernatural hot mess after another. Honestly, our appetite for vampires/shape-shifters/Maenads/werewolves/whatever could support a few more seasons of the show, but better to bow out gracefully than to overstay a welcome.

But before we say goodbye there’s a lot to wrap up. What will become of Sook-eh and “Vampire” Bill Compton? What about Sookie’s friends: Lafayette, Sam, Eric, Pam, Jessica, and resting-bitch-face exemplar Tara? What about her cute/dumb brother Jason? Will Bon Temps even be standing by the end of the season? These characters have packed a lot of living into about two calendar years’ worth of story, and the show is an ever-entertaining newsletter from our really eccentric cousins down south. It’s horrified us, titillated us, made us laugh, and made sexposition a legitimate narrative device for HBO. Now it’s only right that we greet its end by going back to the beginning. Vamp up, everyone, because we’ve only got three weeks till the final season begins, and there’s much to cover.

True Blood Binge-Watching Guide

Number of Seasons: 6 (70 episodes)

Time Requirements: 2.5 weeks. Figure two episodes per weeknight, four or five each weekend day. Sure, that’s ambitious, but don’t you want to be ready for the Season 7 premiere on June 22?

Where to Get Your Fix: HBO Go, Amazon Prime

Best Character to Follow: Lafayette Reynolds is the most sensible, most hilarious, and often most believably tender character in the show. While basically everyone in the True Blood universe is guilty of something—everyone besides sweet, lovable, occasional doormat Hoyt, that is— they’re often either too depraved to care or are too busy fighting for their lives to take five for some deep-dive introspection. And who could blame them? Between Maenads and witches and werewolves and constant threat of apocalypse, one hardly has time to existentially better themselves, but that’s exactly what makes Lafayette so crucial: he recognizes he is a deeply flawed person, and often soars above surrounding characters as a result. He may be a supporting role, but he’s given the most dynamic development arc in the show. Lafayette’s behavior actually changes based on challenges he overcomes, which, as viewers, is really what we’re all striving to do on our best days IRL. At times in his life, he’s been a “hooker” (his words, not ours), a drug dealer, a con man and, by his own admission, a person of “poor moral character”—but through it all, he remained our moral center, our Virgil on this journey through mazes of supernatural and human depravity. If we got dropped down into the Hellmouth that is Bon Temps, Louisiana, there’s no one we’d rather have in our foxhole. Consider us glamoured, Lafayette.

Season 4 gets a little rocky. When Bill occupies positions of power, he actually gets pretty annoying, and since he’s moved up significantly in the vampire hierarchy at the start of this season, we get a lot of irritating moments. (Note: the How Much Bill Sucks Index continues to rise at a steady pace into Season 5 and much of Season 6 as well, but since this stands in direct contrast to the How Much We Love Eric Index, it cancels out to neutral. And as always, all problems can be solved with moar Pam.) Fiona Shaw’s brilliantly bat-shit performance as the medium and witch Marnie Stonebrook in Season 4 almost makes this season worth it, but whenever you hear “Hotshot” or see a werepanther, feel free to go re-up the chip bowl without pausing. We’re fully accustomed to crazy on True Blood—we welcome it, even—but this pointless insanity was just too much.

Seasons/Episodes You Can’t Skip:

Season 1: Episode 1, “Strange Love” This show moves fast, and by the end of the first episode there’s already been a murder, graphic sex, and an introduction to 90 percent of the season’s most relevant characters and locations. Start off strong and keep charging, because this whole season plants seeds for concepts you won’t even know to care about until four seasons later when you find yourself going “Ohhhhh, that’s what they meant.” Stay sharp!

Season 2: Episodes 9 and 10, “I Will Rise Up” and “New World in My View” This is a great season that builds on the first and only gets stronger, but these two eps are pivotal, with a few events that have far-reaching consequences in the show. We get to see a new side of sexy vampire Eric, a preview of just how powerful Sookie’s abilities are, and behold the peak crazy of Maryann and her band of familiars (aka the sex-crazed degenerate residents of Bon Temps).

Season 3: Episodes 10 and 12, “I Smell a Rat” and “Evil is Going On”True Blood went three-for-three in its first seasons, with some of the show’s best characters of all appearing in this run. And once again it came on strong in the back end, these two episodes containing big reveals. Both bring information to light that majorly affects everything we will know, and everything we thought we had known, about our two primary characters: Sookie and Bill. If you think you’re starting to hate Bill a little, this will only push you farther along.

Season 4: Episode 12, “And When I Die” This was an uneven slate of episodes for TB, but the finale really brought us back. There’s the return of some faces we once thought gone forever, and a farewell to others we’d grown fond of.

Season 5: Episodes 6 and 12, “Hopeless” and “Save Yourself” We don’t want to spoil anything, so we’ll just say these are good and leave it at that.

Season 6: Episodes 6 and 9, “Don’t You Feel Me” and “Life Matters” In its strongest season since S3, these are the standouts. Everything’s gone so deep at this point that explaining why would risk giving away too much, but but this season wins our Best Use of Pam Award hands down (and that’s the highest honor we have to bestow, so don’t miss a minute).

What better time to find your next best small-screen obsession than right before it’s about to end? You get all the joy of good programming without the anxiety spike of knowing your favorite story is about to go off air for a year—an issue particularly acute with HBO shows and their 10-to-12-episode seasons. And while True Blood will be permanently going to ground after this summer, there will be a bloody reckoning before it does. And why shouldn’t there be? For 70 episodes we’ve been tossed around in a maelstrom of vampires, demons, witches, werewolves, vengeful gods; we’ve earned the most insane ending possible.

In fact, that’s what makes this show great. Even when it’s faltered, True Blood has always followed through on its silent promise to shock and entertain us. Yeah, the whole werepanthers thing went nowhere fast, but then again, they gave us goddamn werepanthers. And for that, we are grateful. If Alan Ball, Mark Hudis, and Brian Buckner (all showrunners at various points) ever felt bashful about introducing potentially polarizing characters or creatures or grotesque acts, they never tipped their hand to the viewer. And sometimes when you watch TV, you just want to slip into an impossible universe and have fun for a while without care or consequence. That’s what True Blood does best, and for our purposes here, what makes its bingeability factor so high. When we need to take our vitamins, we’ll just sad-cram The Wire. (Don’t worry, we love it just like everyone else.)

Not that the show is devoid of substance. True Blood‘s first season drew strong parallels between the fictional struggle for vampire rights and the very real struggle for LGBT rights. When the show premiered in 2008, California was in the midst of a fight over Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-marriages across the state, and “God hates fangs!” sure sounded a lot like the toxic bile we heard spewing out of the Westborough Baptist Church. (If she were an even mildly politically active person, Sookie herself probably would have posed for a NOH8 portrait.) In November of that year, Prop 8 managed to pass (though was later repealed), and equality was denied to millions. Watching True Blood we were all confronted, in a most colorful way, with the absurdity of denying basic rights to our friends and neighbors. Each time someone yelled “Fang banger!” it was like looking at a cartoon of the real bigotry confronted on a daily basis by so many, and you hoped everyone watching this show with lots of hot sex and bitchin’ vampires and stuff would notice that being so openly hateful was actually a pretty stupid and obnoxious way to live.

Though it backed off from the overt nature of Season 1’s activism, that current can still be clearly felt in the show, not least of all with its female characters. True Blood has given us strong women, crazy women, powerful women, evil women, weak women, women who are single mothers, women in leadership positions, and so on. Even if many of those characters have been so extreme they’ve bordered on parody, that’s just everybody in the world of True Blood—around here, it’s equal crazy pay for equal crazy work.

And for those just watching for the nudity, there’s plenty of skin time for all to enjoy.

Best Scene—Russell Edgington Makes His TV Debut:

There is no scene in all of True Blood with a better combination of serious consequences and serious entertainment value than this one. In a show defined by its excesses and gratuitous displays of gore, sex, and gore-sex (we’re looking at you, Bill and Lorena), it’s nice to see some of the show’s bawdier elements brought together with the elegant touch of a masterful actor. Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare) is the vampire’s King of Mississippi. He’s almost 3,000 years old, which means he’s had a lot of time to form his views on human/vampire relations, and gentle, considerate Godric he ain’t. Edgington’s appearance on the nightly news (NSFW clip below) may have been unwelcome by that unfortunate anchor, but like the inhabitants of this fictional America clutching their pearls in fear of Vampire!, we couldn’t pull our eyes from the TV when it happened. All while the inimitable vampire PR maven Nan Flanagan looks on in horror. Best throw to the weather ever!

The Takeaway:

If your town becomes overrun by malevolent supernatural forces multiple times, pack up the mobile home and hit the road. Seriously, Bon Temps deserved to be a ghost town by the end of Season 3. Call us conservative, but we’re a one-blood-orgy-and-done kind of group. Not that we’re seriously complaining; these crazy locals have kept us rapt for many seasons! But we did learn something else valuable during that time: If you’ve got millennia to spend on this mortal coil, make good use of it and get some perspective, for God’s sake. After all, do you want to be a Godric, or do you want to be a Lorena? Wanton bloodlust is fun and all, but you might eventually need those bridges you so gleefully set fire to and danced on the ashes of centuries ago. Forever is a mighty long time, as they say, so clear some space on the infinite calendar for studying global religions, learning every language, or fine tuning your conflict resolution skills—it’s not like you’re in a rush. And there’s one last thing. In one of the most prescient and adorably understated quotes of the show, Bill tells Sookie in episode four of Season 1 that “vampires are always in some kind of trouble, I prefer to be in it with you.” After 70 episodes, we can say with certainty that, yes, vampires are always in some kind of trouble… but not nearly as much as faeries. Faeries have it the worst. So if you’re a faerie: hide!

If You Liked True Blood You’ll Love:

American Horror Story, particularly the Coven edition of Season 3. If there is indeed a “psychosexual horror arms race” happening on TV, no one’s currently stock piling nukes like Ryan Murphy and the magnificent freaky-deakies in his AHS writers’ room. No show has concocted a more delicious brew of humor, camp, scares, mythological creatures and human oddities, and this one comes wrapped in a bow of beautifully disturbing art direction that just begs for a mainlining on a slow Sunday. It’s like having a recurring nightmare that you actually look forward to every night—even if it makes you want to throw up. We haven’t had this much shameful fun since, well, the first three seasons of True Blood.